Hollywood to again whitewash Clinton’s culpability for the 9/11 attacks?

I suppose it was to be expected. Another presidential election cycle, another Hollywood effort to whitewash Bill Clinton’s singular responsibility for the attacks of 11 September 2001, an effort also probably meant to aid Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential ambitions.

First, there was the two-part television miniseries called “The Path to 9/11,” which was aired by ABC in the United States on 10-11 September 2006. Apparently worried that the film’s maker might be going to tell the truth about Clinton’s direct personal responsibility for leaving Osama bin Laden alive and at large so that he could stage an operation that killed nearly 3,000 dead Americans, the media reported that the Clinton organization and its lawyers intervened with ABC to cleanse the film of any attempt to explain — our even suggest — that the ex-president was accountable for the deaths, which he is. Indeed, Clinton’s culpability is so obvious, and the evidence thereof so abundant, that the film was made even after the late-felon Sandy Berger stole some of the documentary proof thereof from the National Archives to protect Clinton’s reputation and his wife’s political viability.

Next, in 2012, came the “Zero Dark Thirty” movie. This film shined the respective apples of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and reportedly was supported by Obama administration briefings that included classified national-security data which was compromised whether or not it was used in the movie. But then, as Hillary Clinton has so definitively proven, U.S. national security matters not at all to Democrats and their Hollywood allies if some vote-losing truth can be hidden or at least distorted long enough to win presidential elections.

Now, there is a third film project about 9/11 that is very likely to provide a second whitewash by making the American-killer Bill Clinton appear as a ready-to-act, would-be hero who was ill-served by the U.S. intelligence community, and especially the CIA.

Late in November, 2015, I received the e-mail below from Lawrence Wright, author of the purportedly non-fiction work, The Looming Tower. I should note that Wright contacted me after I resigned from the CIA because I had been CIA’s Chief of Alec Station (December 1995- June 1999), the officers of which, with their courageous CIA colleagues overseas, gave Bill Clinton at least ten opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden from May, 1998, until April-May, 1999. Two of these opportunities would have been executed by CIA, the other eight by the U.S. military using CIA intelligence. (NB: For an open-source confirmation of many of these opportunities, see The 9/11 Commission Report. The media appear to have skipped these pages.)

I wanted to alert you to the fact that I have sold a series to Hulu about the run-up to 9/11, based in part on my book, “The Looming Tower.” It is a dramatic series, not a documentary. I am working with the Academy Award -winning director Alex Gibney, and writer Dan Futterman, who has two Academy Award nominations for his work.

Mike, you’ll be a character in this series, because of your role at Alec Station. Alex, Danny, and I would be grateful for the opportunity to talk with you in person in order to get a clearer understanding of your experience.

We were hoping to make a trip to the DC area the week of Dec. 14, and would like to talk to you while we’re there. Is there a date when you could meet us that week? For our purposes, the 16th or 17th of December would work best.

Many thanks for your consideration on this.

Larry

After reading the note, I decided to neither respond nor participate. I have had a good deal of experience with Mr. Wright. While he was preparing the Looming Tower, for example, I had a goodly number of telephone conversations with him — all of which I taped — during which I answered his questions and tried to explain the multiple chances the CIA had given Clinton to eliminate bin Laden. I mistakenly thought that Mr. Wright was a serious writer, not a Democratic shill, but the book he produced is so far from the truth about what happened intelligence-wise before 9/11 — at least as I experienced it, and I was pretty involved — that it is quite near a soap opera-like parody of reality, albeit spiced up with bits of sophomoric psychological analysis of the people he describes, Americans and Islamists alike. The Looming Tower, in fact, may be a perfect book on which to base the fictional and likely reality-free dramatic series Mr. Wright refers to in his note.

So, as Mr. Wright noted above, the American people soon will be treated to another piece of what is nearly certain to be pro-Clinton propaganda about the “run-up to 9/11.” No doubt it will be glitzy and entertaining, and it will damn the U.S. Intelligence Community — especially the CIA — because, as Mr. Wright said on Fox News Sunday on 1 October 2006, Clinton was “poorly served” by the U.S. intelligence agencies. [1]

Well, Americans can watch this coming film and think what they want, but there is one man who knows the truth about the run-up to 9/11. Fortunately for the nation and for its historical record — safer now with Berger dead — this one man publicly explained that truth to a live audience on the day before 3,000 Americans died at al-Qaeda’s hands; they died, of course, only because their president repeatedly and knowingly refused to try to defend them.

“I nearly got him. And I could have killed him,” Clinton told a meeting of businessmen in Australia, “but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.” [2]

Clinton, for once, told the truth [3], be it only in the first ten words of the quote. While Mr. Wright may be right when he says I am Prussian-like, pious Catholic — I assume that is not a compliment, but it does have a nice ring to it — the women and men of CIA’s Operations Directorate performed magnificently from 1995 until Clinton left office, giving him at least ten opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and — on many of those occasions — several of his senior lieutenants as well. Had Clinton acted, he almost certainly would have foreclosed chances for the 9/11 attack, and he would have made it much less possible for George W. Bush to exploit the citizenry’s post-9/11 anger and ardor for revenge to win support for the mad, Mrs. Clinton-advocated invasion of Iraq.

So go see Mr. Wright’s movie, but keep in mind that if it is anything less than a scathing and fact-based indictment of Clinton’s personal culpability for the 9/11 attack, its casualties, and most of the U.S. disasters in the Muslim world that have followed, the film will be not a drama but a fantasy that defies the truth avowed by the man who knows both the whole truth and the fact of his own guilt, namely, Bill Clinton.

Indeed, with Clinton having told the truth, what is the point of another 9/11 movie? Clinton has acknowledged that 9/11 occurred because of his self-centeredness and moral cowardice, not because of an intelligence failure. It seems that Wright and his Hollywood buddies could save themselves a lot of work by getting Clinton to send a simple Tweet saying “Scheuer has been honest and absolutely correct about the many chances CIA gave me to capture or kill bin Laden. The 9/11 dead are my responsibility, not CIA’s.”

The would-be film makers then could move on to produce a film about the more important question of why Clinton and his senior advisers — Clarke, Tenet, Berger, etc. — thought it far preferable to protect the lives of bin Laden-supporting foreigners than to even try to protect those of American citizens. They might also delve into why Hillary Clinton found it preferable to abet the murder of four U.S. officials in Benghazi rather then tell Americans that her failed and juvenile post-Arab Spring policies, and the lead role she played in the U.S. military intervention in Libya, have brought the United States an ongoing national-security disaster that is almost as great as the invasion of Iraq.

Ah, but to imagine that either the Clintons or contemporary Hollywood would ever tell the truth is, as Sam Spade might say, “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

http://abcnews.go.com/US/bill-clinton-hours-911-attacks-killed-osama-bin/story?id=24801422. One must wonder about the workings of Bill Clinton’s mind. He thought it was not morally correct to defend Americans by killing bin Laden and perhaps 300 al-Qaeda or Taliban supporters, but his moral compass allowed him to be content and happy with allowing 650,000 Iraqi children to die of disease and malnutrition from the sanctions he and his European friends imposed on Saddam, a brutal man but one whose country posed no threat to the United States. Clinton also found it morally acceptable to take part in a Balkans’ war that was a zero threat to U.S. national security and to thereby slaughter Serbs willy nilly from 20,000 feet, a people who posed no threat to the United States. Finally, what on earth could possibly possess Bill Clinton to believe that he was or is in any way a “better” or more decent man than Osama bin Laden? After all, Bin Laden sought to defend Muslims, Clinton allowed Americans to be undefended and murdered. Though they are slender, Mr. Wright ought to turn his talents for psychological analysis on Clinton.

Given Clinton’s uniquely truthful statement, logic suggests that some of the members of his administration and some of the senior U.S. intelligence officials who testified under oath before the Congress and/or the 9/11 Commission probably are guilty of perjury.

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Author: Michael F. Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer worked at the CIA as an intelligence officer for 22 years. He was the first chief of its Osama bin Laden unit, and helped create its rendition program, which he ran for 40 months. He is an American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst.
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